Gaming & Culture —

How to fix co-op gaming

Cooperative play is still an unsatisfying experience in a lot of video games. …

If there's one thing we're a fan of around here at Ars Technica, it's a game featuring strong cooperative play. We enjoy it so much, in fact, that we sometimes offer our own solutions on how to make multiplayer sessions even better. Andre Vrignaud, better known as Ozymandias on Xbox Live, appears to be a big fan, too. Vrignaud, whose job at Microsoft is to take a long-term look at the gaming industry and predict where trends are headed over the next few years, was intrigued by some recent musings by Penny Arade's Tycho on the nature of cooperative play. In turn, Vrignaud sat down with a coworker to talk about the basics of co-op gaming.

The result of their brainstorming session resulted in what Vrignaud has labeled The Co-op Gaming Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights is divided into two sections, one for things which could easily be implemented in current games and one discussing potential—and much more challenging—design possibilities. While some of the suggestions don't seem all that likely, one that is easy to get enthused about is the following: "A game that allows co-op online play should also support co-op play locally, either through LAN or split-screen (ideally both). An online subscription should not be required to play co-op locally on a LAN."

It's still a bit confounding that titles such as Army of Two, which are built around the whole idea of playing through with a friend, don't implement local LAN co-op play. While disabling multiplayer features between regions is understandable because of connection speeds, it seems rather ludicrous to not include a mode which is often considered essential for multiplayer games. That's as far as the Xbox 360 version is concerned, anyway, as the PlayStation 3 deftly avoids this problem, making it the version of choice for those who would rather play with a friend locally.

Something not mentioned in the Bill of Rights—but that I would like to see—is the idea of adaptive puzzles in future games: if two (or more) gamers are playing through a campaign together, certain sequences could work differently than they would with one player. A simple example could involve distracting hostiles while the other player maneuvers their character into a secure location and then trigger an event which will allow their cohort to enter undetected. A more complex example would be taking one of the multicharacter puzzles from a game like Indigo Prophecy and having two players work on it simultaneously (either in splitscreen mode or by relaying information to each other via voice chat).

As things stand, co-op gaming has yet to be deemed an important enough in-game feature by most developers, so none of them try to implement even a set of basic features to meet player expectations. Hopefully, this will change in the near future and some of the suggestions offered by Vrignaud will become a part of standard development.